Much of the discussion surrounding Into Great Silence, detailing the daily rituals of the monks inhabiting the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps, is sure to focus on how Phillip Groning's nearly three-hour documentary provides a window into a rarely seen spiritual world. It does perform this function, and admirably, but not for the purposes of providing clarity - the end result leaves a sense of monastic existence more exotic and otherworldly than one could imagine. It's almost as if Groning, having lived alongside the brothers and participated in their rituals for six months, was left by the experience disinclined to hew to any standards of linear narrativity when constructing his film, drifting instead towards an impressionistic wash of images and, yes, sounds that are often impenetrable, but always seductive.

Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert’s review of Into Great Silence.

A good month for Iranian cinema in New York. Not only is Jafar Panahi’s superlative Offside opening here in the beginning of March, but also thanks to the Museum of Modern Art, Abbas Kiarostami will be honored with a major retrospective, Abbas Kiarostami: Image Maker. Running from March 1 to May 26, the series will encompass the director and artist's films, photography, and installations. In total, thirty-three of his films, including shorts and features, will be shown, among them, the umissable Through the Olive Trees, Taste of Cherry, Ten and, of course, The Wind Will Carry Us.

And there will always be a special place in our hearts for Close-Up, one of the best films of the past twenty years and maybe my all-time favorite fiction-documentary hybrid. If you haven’t yet experienced this formally dazzling, utterly humane work of art, which uses the true tale of a man who claimed to be filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf as a springboard to get into all sorts of ethical, spiritual, and (duh, it’s Kiarostami) meta-cinematic debates, then don’t forego the Monday March 5 and Thursday March 15 screenings. The Number 23 can wait another day.

Best Actor hopefuls Miguel Angel Hoppe and Fernando Arroyo

Because last year, we received mounds of letters (real, actual hand-written letters) from fans thanking all the awesome prognosticators at Reverse Shot for aiding them in their annual office Oscar pools, we thought we’d extend a helping hand again. Though we’ve kept decidedly mum this year regarding the Academy Awards (as faithful readers know, our, uh, “passion” for nominees such as Dreamgirls, Notes on a Scandal, and Babel might have gotten in the way of our reportage), we of course have our favorites we’ll be rooting for while we chomp our nachos and swill down our Rolling Rock. Of course, it’s not about who you favor, but WHO WILL WIN? Who will clutch his glorious trophy and with it scale the heights of fame and fortune, a la Linda Hunt? Who will use her newfound clout and recognition to finally find spiritual soalce with herself and peace with others, like Sandy Dennis?

This year seems pretty cut and dry, with a head-to-head best picture battle between critical front-runner Death of Mr. Lazarescu (can unanimous acclaim work against it?!?) and audience favorite The Black Dahlia (which would give Brian De Palma his record fourth Best Picture Oscar). While there’s no obvious lead for best actor like last year’s Banlop Lomnoi (Tropical Malady), it looks like it’s come down to a neck and neck battle between Broken Sky leads Miguel Angel Hoppe and Fernando Arroyo. Best Actress, of course, will go to The Queen’s Helen Mirren.

But rather than continue to rehash all the predictions made elsewhere, I’d like to take the time to reminisce about the moment of my childhood when I realized how essential the Academy Awards were to the landscape of the art form known as cinema.

Come fly with me in my movie time machine back to 1989: The civil rights movement was in its nascent period, Wallace was leading in the presidential primaries, and polio was the unseen evil invading our children’s summer camps. That was also the year that Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy rightfully wiped the floor with that angry agitator Spike Lee’s overly incendiary and just-plain icky Do the Right Thing at the Oscars. America’s myopic liberal cognoscenti had widely proclaimed Lee’s sugarcoated, wishful-thinking portrait of racial unrest as the year’s most important film (only Wim Wenders had the balls to rain on Spike’s parade, calling him a coward at Cannes for not “taking sides” in his overly balanced political film). Yet the Academy Awards had the foresight to step up and recognize that the themes and lovable characters of Miss Daisy would prove to be so enduring, that its climactic proclamation of racial union (“You’re my best friend!”) would be brought back to life in a future best picture winner, last year’s hard-hitting Crash.

Do the Right Thing’s righteous loss for Best Picture (it wasn’t even nominated, to make way for more trenchant, artistically viable fare like Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams, and My Left Foot), was the culmination of a decade that saw the triumph of challenging character studies that had foregone narrative bloat and spectacle (Gandhi, Out of Africa, The Last Emperor) and the passageway to another, which would see the uncontested, worthy triumphs of Dances with Wolves over Goodfellas, Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, and Shakespeare in Love over The Thin Red Line. I can think of no greater testament to Oscar’s sizzling-iron branding of Classic onto American films than Driving Miss Daisy: Dan Aykroyd’s exasperated head-shaking, oft-called upon to loosen up awkward scene transitions; Esther Rolle’s slow-motion death-by-snap-peas; Morgan Freeman’s feeding Tandy some “Tanks-givin’ pie” before she croaks (black people aren’t just good drivers—they make for nice human feeding tubes, too!). What will this year’s Oscar memories be? Write in your choices and receive an extra-special handmade T-shirt, featuring the iron-on Oscar-winning actor of your choice.*

Happy Oscars.

* All we have left are Roberto Benigni and Margaret Rutherford

"Don't fret, William...at least you're still white!"


Contrary to what its title suggests, Amazing Grace isn't really about the origins of the immortal Christian hymn. Neither is it, directly, about the British slave trade. Instead it's about the tireless campaign of William Wilberforce, Member of Parliament, to abolish the slave trade in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by arguing against it on the floor of the House of Commons and by bringing the horrors of the institution to public awareness. But by centering on Wilberforce (played with passion but also with a scrubbed, boy-band-ish gloss by Iaon Gruffudd) Amazing Grace deflects the pain and humiliation intrinsic to its subject matter, relegating its only actual African voice to one underdeveloped side character.

Click here to read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin’s review of Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace.

2007’s already shaping up to be a heck of a movie year, considering all the terrific festival hang-overs that are, or will soon be, gracing New York theaters (Regular Lovers, Offside, Syndromes and a Century, Still Life, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone, Black Book). And as if we needed more news to rejoice, like manna from heaven, the gods have granted us another (and for many, a first) look at Tsai Ming-liang’s The Wayward Cloud. Opening this week at Anthology Film Archives, Tsai’s alternately buoyant and excoriating porno-musical, the most obviously unreleasable of this fine, fine, fine director’s oeuvre (it’s a couple of years old by now, but as freshly rancid as ever), can finally be discussed, booed, and bravoed by befuddled downtown audiences. All the better for film culture: for everyone lulled into a self-reflexive movie trance by Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Wayward promises to be a shock to the system: like his earlier The Hole, it’s a pseudo-musical, one that intersperses fantasy sequences along with its narrative proper. Yet what’s more alienating for viewers this time, is that unlike The Hole’s direct dialectics between dystopic drudgery and spangled fantasy-land, Wayward Cloud uneasily balances between the different sectors of social and cultural exploitation: in “our world” that of obsessive pornographic objectification, and in “the other world” those pop songs and movie images that provide false outlet. These fantasies bump and grind up against one another with increasing chaffing, and provide for one of the greatest moments in Tsai’s career—when Yi-Ching Lu (the mother from What Time Is It There?) gets her crinkled face splashed with splooge, the director cuts to a luxurious Lotte Lenye-like cabaret act in an abandoned garage, complete with black-tighted dancers and an expandable spider web. It has to be seen to be believed, and nothing in The Hole matches its poignancy.

Of course, then, there’s the ending, glibly (heartlessly?) spoiled by Nathan Lee in the VIllage Voice this week. Lee is a friend and supporter, but we hope readers take his toss-off dismissal with a grain of salt. The release of a Tsai film, especially one this divisive, is a moment for rejoicing, and to turn people away from Tsai’s “garish negativity” is to ignore just what it is that's got his panties in a twist. Tsai has mentioned in interviews that this film is his response to the porn industry in Taiwan; regarding sex, there’s always been a fine line between release and rutting in his films—Wayward Cloud tips the scales and ends in full-blown horror. An “utterly unconvincing love story” cites Lee. Trust me, Lee’s looking for love in all the wrong places: Wayward’s final twenty minutes eradicate any lingering sense that there will be a love match between its two wandering protagonists. It’s useless to compare Wayward to Tsai’s other films on a gradation scale—like in Ozu, the same images, motifs, and plot trajectories reveal themselves again and again in his films, ever deepening (the watermelons of Vive l’amour make a perfectly natural progression from that film’s lonesome bowling to lonesome balling—the addition of a sexual partner doesn’t make the sex any more “fruitful”).

A recent re-viewing of What Time Is It There? reminded me how essential Tsai is to the current international art-film scene, just how rigorous his static mise-en-scène is, and how his compositions can either function as lullaby or nightmare, with a subtle shift of attitude. If What Time Is It There? was the ultimate refinement, thus far, of Tsai’s style and compassion, with its nearly metaphysical love story and searing portrait of loneliness, Wayward Cloud shakes things up considerably. See it; get energized; get angry; throw things at the screen; applaud. Just go see it.

Because you can't get enough, read more about The Wayward Cloud here.

Eleven months ago, I posted on this blog about a Museum of Modern Art screening of a superb Canadian film called Six Figures; the problem was, I waited until the day before the movie was set to play to get the word out.

Well, now I’ve gone and done it again – War Hospital, co-directed by Six Figures helmer David Christensen, shows tomorrow night (Saturday February 17) at 6:15 pm, and then again on Wednesday, February 28 at 830 PM as part of MOMA’s annual documentary showcase. (Christensen will be on hand for a Q & A after the Saturday night screening.) Most of you probably have weekend plans – and I’m guessing Ghost Rider is involved – but having seen both films, I can safely say that War Hospital is the better choice (even if it doesn’t feature Nic the Tic pathologically swigging jelly beans around in a martini glass while watching a monkey practice kung-fu on television).

If the elegantly allusive mise-en-scène and creeping middle-class unease of Six Figures (which still hasn’t popped up on DVD) suggested a fruitful union between Edward Yang and Michael Haneke, War Hospital reminds strongly of Frederick Wiseman: it’s a nimble yet substantive slice of institutional verité set in the world’s largest field hospital in Northern Kenya. Lopiding Hospital, founded and staffed, by the International Committee of the Red Cross, is the main destination for victims of the Sudanese Civil war; depending on where you stand on its sprawling grounds, the place is either a teeming hive of activity or a deathly silent tomb.

The film’s impact lies in Christensen and Lewis’s understanding of exactly when and where to shoot. The texture is absolutely riveting, alternately fly-on-the-wall and on-the-fly. The lack of a narrator or talking heads gives War Hospital the feeling of a headlong plunge, but there’s no sense of obfuscation for its own sake: the compassion and curiosity underpinning the project are palpable in every frame. Christensen himself calls the film “cubist, but its multiplicity of perspectives are amazingly clear-eyed.

...on the eve of the opening preview of Peter Shaffer's Equus revival starring (GASP! FART! HOLYFUCKINGSHIT, NO!) Daniel Radcliffe - Harry Potter himself! - that Daniel and everyone around him should be commended for putting up this remarkable play, and more importantly: Fuck Harry Potter.

Equus is a phenomenal work - one of the few plays that has continued to move me - as it has many others - upon every reading since the age of 15. It is an absolutely unforgettable piece of writing that has never received due praise, in large part because many remember only the 1977 film adaptation which was ultimately lackluster in most all respects. The hubbub surrounding Daniel doing nude scenes and its effect on his Potter character/the film franchise is alarming; that the young actor has chosen to tackle this tough material at the Gielgud in front of a live audience six days a week displays taste, intelligence, and, hopefully, a love for his craft. That everyone else is concerned with the fact that Harry Potter gets naked displays how utterly ridiculous we've become as an audience.

From thisislondon.com: "Gone are the round, NHS glasses and his hitherto ever- so-geeky appearance, to be replaced by a toned (and surprisingly hirsute) torso, tousled hair and the merest hint of manly stubble.

'Now our star is out there doing full-frontal sex. We've been blown completely out of the water by this.'"

I too am just so angry that Equus has thrown a wrench into Warners' publicity machine for Harry's chaste first kiss. What will they possibly do? How will we, as an audience, ever feel as connected to that sublime moment? It would truly have been transcendent, and now this... fucking, please.

From cinematical.com: "It's old news by now that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe will be appearing nude on stage in London during a production of Equus. However, we've recently come across this poster for the upcoming play, and it's hard not to find it just a little bit disturbing. They've even made Radcliffe's nipples into the horse's eyes, and it'll be hard to look at Harry Potter the same way again. The play is about a boy who really loves his horse, and Radcliffe decided to take the role to prove that he could play other parts besides the boy wizard."

You know what, they're right. Man will it be hard to look at Harry Potter the same way again. Man will it be hard to look at Harry Potter the same way again. Harry Potter. The same way. Again. Harry Potter.

Awesome.

And through all of this: Anyone want to mention that our little Harry kills his horse with a fucking spike? Anyone? Through the eye!

Nope. Just that he's naked. That Harry Potter is naked and sexing. And we might not like the umpteenth installment of the quadrillion dollar franchise as much because of it. Outrage.

Again, fuck Harry Potter. And many thanks to the extremely talented up-and-comer Thea Sharrock (if we're lucky she'll be in film soon enough...) for taking this tough material back to the stage. And a well-deserved MUCH RESPECT to Daniel R. for making the decision to take the heat and step out of the Hollywood machine for a bit to be a part of something really special on the stage. I hope to make it over there to see this one...which is far more than I can say for Harry Potter 17: Curse of the Evil Hogwart Witch Sorcerer's Secret Cauldron of Newt Tales and Puppy Balls...of Azkaban.

And just for the record: I think the Equus poster is great.

I doubt that anyone will ever match the balanced stridency and sentimentality that Jonathan Richman's song "Give Paris One More Chance" manages as a bursting, corny catalog of everything right about "the home of Piaf and Chevalier," but Avenue Montaigne takes a crack. The film's helmed by Daniele Thompson, a relative latecomer to direction but a professional screenwriter since 1966, with a resume that covers all of subsequent popular French cinema. I mean popular, not acclaimed: she had a hand in the eighties teen romp La Boum, the generational impact of which in France was at the seismic level of John Hughes—if you think, based on the art-house stuff that makes it stateside, that the average French moviegoer is a creature of immaculate, elevated taste, think again. Having worked at a video store, I can testify that La Boum still out-rents Claire Denis films by a 1000:1 margin among Francophones.

Click here to read the rest of Nick Pinkerton’s review of Avenue Montaigne.

By sheer coincidence (well, not quite, there's an ongoing Donald Cammell retro at Walter Reade), this past weekend was spent by this humble cinephile taking in a slew of films widely considered cult, occult, or both. A brief survey:

Demon Seed

The robot woman in Superman 3 gave me the screaming heebeejeebees, so you can imagine how Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977) affected me. What’s incredible about this sci-fi/horror cult legend is how often it skirts the laughable—especially with that floating polygon weapon of doom -- only to firmly and ultimately stake out a spot as one of the movie history’s most highly unsettling experiences. A possible amalgam of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rosemary’s Baby, and the cinema of David Cronenberg, Demon Seed (based on the Dean Koontz novel) concerns itself with the borders between rationality and irrationality, flesh and metal in our technological age of unstable identities, boundries, and ethics. The story is simple but unforgettable -- an A.I. supermachine, Proteus, takes control of Julie Christie’s computerized abode and sets out to make itself immortal by, yes, impregnating her. In the course of her rape-by-house, Christie and the audience discover Proteus, so determined in its rational pursuit to aid the human race, has been prey to the same emotional and unreasonable impulses that plague our species. The net result of Proteus’ deisgns is the same as the film’s Borges parable of Shih Huang Ti’s plan to build the Great Wall of China and burn all the books that proceeded his reign: nothing. Or, perhaps, something unknown and thus without a name: Demon Seed inverts 2001’s finale, in which man outwits machine to climb a step on the evolutionary ladder to be reborn as diety, any Zarathustrian pretensions (evoked by the psychedelic computer animations that mimic Kubrick’s film’s “trip” sequence) replaced by an ungodly union that portends pure destruction and ersatz hope (or is it the other way around?) in the naive guise of an offspring who's no messianic star child. Like the best of nightmares, Demon Seed is absurd, uncanny, horrific -- if a film can ever be said to live up to the bill of “getting under one’s skin,” this is it.

Lucifer Rising

Most famous -- or infamous -- for having its soundtrack composed and performed by a member of the Manson family from within jail, American Avant-Garde pioneer and occult practitioner Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1970-1980) is to date the concluding movement of his Magick Lantern Cycle and, if the last major work from this accursed cinematic dreamer, then surely a fantastic way to go out. And when actually experienced and not simply relegated to a piece of trivia one realizes why. A ritual enacted across time and space, sutured into evocative being with an incomparably expressive montage, Lucifer Rising leaves behind, as has been oft noted, the Thanatotic tendency of earlier Anger to engage in a regenerative heralding of . . . you guessed it. See, according to Crowley protégé Anger, Lucifer isn’t the devil of Judeo-Christianity; instead he is Venus, the Morning Star, god of light and creativity. But if the advent of the deity’s energies makes Lucifer Rising the most spacious, luscious, and glorious of Anger’s films among those I’ve seen -- with Egyptian gods (Cammell) and goddesses (Myriam Gybril) summoning the forces of nature, processions through Celtic shrines, and mysterious antechambers housing or incubating the pagan messiah, a UFO hovering above a sphinx -- it’s also the most hermetic: unless you’re a studied occultist the flury of symbols and figures will fly way over your head. Carel Rowe’s “Illuminating Lucifer” essay (contained in The Avant-Garde Film anthology, ed. P. Adams Sitney) helped as a guide (though I had to stop myself mid-eye roll at certain points -- never been one for the new age), but this is a long way from the more accessible, and hardly less haunting, realms of Anger masterpieces like Fireworks and Scorpio Rising. The Left Hand Path is esoteric that way.

Performance

Performance (1968), written by Cammell, lensed by Nicolas Roeg, and directed by both, is one of those permanent staples of the midnight circuit that benefits as much from obscurantism as from counterculture cache. A second time through it I still couldn't quite catch everything (those thick British accents need to be cracked via DVD subtitling) but got more than the first: as in Demon Seed, identities clash and merge, although how parasitic or symbiotic (or how sane) the process is in the transformation of mobster James Fox through his encounter with reclusive former rock star and current hippie God, I mean Mick Jagger, is open to question. Perhaps I still haven’t gotten past the film’s stylistic pyrotechnics -- aside from Don’t Look Now Roeg would never surpass the radical editing and compositions of Performance, a film unafraid of scrambling and reorganizing the associational abilities of its audience to create juxtapositions at once audaciously blunt and alchemically arcane. Sure, it’s partly what Parker Tyler would deem a “pad film” in its lay-about erotica, partly a vehicle for Sir Mick (if only through his blistering “Memo From Turner”), but it’s all Cinema, a deconstruction of conventional viewing habits portending an entirely new approach toward moving images.

What Is It?

I won’t spend too much time on Crispin Hellion Glover’s much talked about labor of love (premiered in 2005 and now making its way across the country as part of a screening and book signing tour; this critic came late to it in its third time through New York City at the IFC) because I plan on writing a full-length review about it soon, but suffice it to say that What Is It?, in the words of 8 ½, “has none of the merits of the avant-garde film and all the drawbacks.” That’s not because What Is It? -- which features a cast largely composed of people with Down Syndrome, a soundtrack including Manson family hits and Johnny Rebel’s “Some Niggers Never Die (They Just Smell That Way)” and characters identified as “Dueling Demi-God Auteur and the young man's inner psyche” -- is unfortunate juvenilia, but because its provocations fall far short of its director’s intentions to contain “content that some will consider beyond the realm of good and evil” and to challenge the taboos enforced by “corporate funded and distributed cinema.” While many try to go Nietzsche and fight the system, few cinematically succeed: Glover’s spirit is evident in this debut film (and his Big Slideshow collage/performances display a level of craft missing from What Is It?), but the follow through isn’t there yet. More to come regarding this singular effort . . .

Is it just us, or is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others just okay? Perhaps a wee bit sentimentalized, somehow too narratively pat, a little prefabricated? Well no wonder it’s received excellent notices across the board.

But there's more to say about it:

“Curiously—or perhaps not—the four decades of economic hardship and political oppression endured by the citizens of the former German Democratic Republic have, in the years since reunification, given way to "Ostalgie," a pervasive nostalgia for life in the GDR (see, as an example, Wolfgang Becker's smash-hit, international award-winning comedy Goodbye Lenin!). Whatever its modest virtues and minor flaws, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's similarly lauded, Oscar-nominated debut feature The Lives of Others offers a refreshing corrective to this nostalgia, albeit one steeped in a sentimentalized uplift all its own.”

Click here to read the rest of Chris Wisniewski’s review of The Lives of Others.

But...have no fear, due to a strikingly non-coincidental release schedule, you have the option of seeing instead Nina Toussaint and Massimo Iannetta's more restrained, considered, and haunting documentary about, basically, the same subject matter, The Decomposition of the Soul, now playing at Film Forum.

"By returning to the scene of the crime, Decomposition" recalls 2003's S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, in which two survivors of the Cambodian genocide revisit the camp where they narrowly escaped death. The difference between the films is conceptual and strategic: in S21 the survivors confront their former captors who must somehow explain their horrific practices, even if no explanation can ever be satisfactory; but in Decomposition only the victims inhabit the eerily empty Berlin-Hohenschonhausen, currently serving, like S21, as a memorial."

Click here to read all of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of The Decomposition of the Soul.

The conspirators


Mindlessly flipping between late-night talk shows yesterday (the viewing equivalent of digging lint balls out of my belly button, and then sniffing them), I rest on channel 4 long enough (three seconds) to hear mutton-joweled Jay Leno unsurprisingly drop some vaguely slurrish stinkbomb—don’t remember the elegantly mounted joke, but the payoff was something like “that won’t be the first time someone from San Francisco's been mounted from behind.” Unsurprising, whatever. Zapped over to Letterman, who’d surely be thrilled that the Colts had walked off with the win. His response was one of his patently unfunny top tens, two of which punch-lined with jokes about the horrors of “showering with other dudes” and something about “sharing a locker room with Prince.” (This not long after the infamous—sadly only in my apartment—Top Ten Signs Your Husband Is Gay).

Okay, I get the message, and I don’t have to flip to Jimmy Kimmel to be further humiliated. Off to the refuge of the internet. But what’s this? Snickers pulled a slew of not so SATISFECTAWESOMETAGIOUS Super Bowl ads because their content (in which two mechanics accidentally locked their lips when trying to wrap them around a peanut-nouget-chocolate stick, only to nearly vomit with unimaginable disgust and rip their own hair out) had offended some viewers. A Masterfoods spokesman was quoted as saying: “As with all of our Snickers advertising, our goal was to capture the attention of our core Snickers consumer, primarily 18-to-24-year-old adult males.” Just another day at the office, really.

This morning, making all this bile a deeper shade of maize was the newsflash that Evangelical preacher and yummy official Reverse Shot boy-toy Ted Haggard celebrated Jesus Camp’s Oscar nomination this week by finally entering full-blown heterosexuality. Yes, sorry boys, he’s officially taken (by the Lord, that is, as well as the hot vagina he can’t wait to start diving into with open jaw). And that sex-n-meth hotel raunchfest was a one-time-only deal. According to the Denver Post, this strapping mix of Aaron Eckhart, Patrick Swayze, and Dolph Lundgren, “emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is ‘completely heterosexual.’”

But really popping the cherry this month for me was the universal embrace of the favorite film of both Isaiah Washington and mindless theater queens nationwide: Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal, which at least has the decency to wrap its homophobia in a nice pretty Oscar-ready package. I’ve already detailed my loathing of Eyre’s dum-dum potboiler, though I did whip myself into a frenzy for forgetting to mention its screenplay was written by everyone’s favorite misogynist, misanthrope, and generally crappy scenarist Patrick Marber. True Notes on a Scandal might have even bigger problems than its mind-bendingly outmoded take on twisted predatory lesbian love—like, say, a sputtering narrative predicated both on idiotic coincidences and nonsensical editing (riddle me this, Scandal fans, if it’s so “tightly plotted,” then why does Bill Nighy scream and spittle on the sidewalk to Dench that she’s a “fucking old witch” before sharing a friendly, casual glass of chardonnay with her merely a few scenes later?). But really, I shouldn’t have been surprised, as dismayed as I am, by the gay community’s utter embrace of the film—no, not merely as gawdy trash, but as a serious psychological character study—as per a whole slew of worthless “this is my gym routine and my complete and utter lack of knowledge about art” alt lifestyle blogheads. Furthermore, a couple of critics have gone so far as to call Notes Chabrolian—trust me, if this is Chabrolian, then Tom Shadyac is Billy Wilder.

And before we go, let’s not forget the most-watched short film of the week, young master “Donnie Davies”’ is-it-a-joke-or-isn’t-it “God Hates Fags” video (nope, no link here, sorry), seemingly as oft-emailed betwixt friends as SNL’s “Dick in a Box” digital short (which contrary to all reports, is a joke!) Though Davies was finally outed (as an actor, that is), the sentiment behind the video remains in question, and the rotund featured player’s refusal to identify himself or take a stand on the issue he’s raised simply just makes him (and his viewers) complicit in this ongoing debasement of a supposedly enlightened popular culture. There’s always Norbit.

While for most cinephiles January and February are the pits of the film year, for this one they constitute prime time -- no guilt over spending beautiful days indoors watching flickering images in a darkened room, no distracting baseball season, no annoying festival gossip and "Didya see?" proddings. The following are short takes on recent viewings that RS and many others have inexplicably left by the wayside. Perhaps Cinematic Seasonal Affective Disorder is to blame for the oversight. Here's the remedy.

The Good Shepherd

Released at the end of 2006 to little to no fanfare, Robert De Niro's sophomore directorial effort (thirteen years after A Bronx Tale) is a fascinating, confusing conspiratorial tragedy that, if anything, puts the auteur theory to the test. Scripted by Eric Roth, Tony Kushner's counterforce in the writing of Munich, the film follows Edward Wilson (based on James Jesus Angleton and convincingly played by a contained Matt Damon), a quiet, privileged WASP who joins Skull and Bones and through his connections there becomes a vital component of the Office of Strategic Services and eventually the founding of the CIA. As in Munich, The Good Shepherd puts emphasis on the personal sacrifices of a high-level government servant even as his faith in the righteousness of his cause is profoundly shaken. Damon continually compromises moral principles and family integrity (though the film's supposition that anyone would abandon and mistreat a wife who looks like Angelina Jolie is patently absurd) as the Cold War counterintelligence battles he wages become more and more poisoned by distrust and suspicion within his own ranks. Unlike Munich, however, The Good Shepherd is well-directed and refuses to resort to emotional manipulation -- is this then the doing of an improved Roth or a superior-to-Spielberg De Niro? At times one wishes The Good Shepherd would take a page from JFK (coincidentally, frequent Stone collaborator Robert Richardson serves as Bobby D.'s D.P.) and detonate as full- and far-out hallucinogenic American paranoia (running the risk of making its plot all the more perplexing and in need of serious footnotes -- my father had to fill me in on some of the real-life parallels, and I'm still itching to read Norman Mailer's epic Harlot's Ghost), but both Roth and De Niro's commitment to portraying the human, political, class and ethnic factors driving governmental exclusivity and secrecy is thoughtful and accomplished with impressive classicism.

The Comedy of Power

Claude Chabrol's 8,459 film also takes real events as its starting point, but in exploring private-sector-exploiting-public-sector corruption takes a far more cynical line and a slightly wrier approach than The Good Shepherd regarding the individual's helplessness in avoiding subsumption by the machine. The Village Voice's Jim Ridley gets it right when he notes Chabrol is fairly uninterested in the workings of the "Enron of France" scandal on which The Comedy of Power is based, but he fails to see Chabrol's real concern. It's clear Isabelle Huppert's Jeanne Charmont-Killman is the film's subject, although Chabrol's angle is, to put it bluntly, odd: The Comedy of Power empowers its female judge protagonist to the point where she can resist her investigated enemies' misogynist terror tactics (including bribing her boss to pair her with another female judge because "women devour their own" -- Huppert and her new partner together become even more formidable) and overshadow her emasculated husband (who can't even prevent his own nephew from moving in on her), but not so much that she can take down the undeveloped corporate baddies. Where Wilson discretely wrestles with his conscience, Charmont-Killman does just fine for herself, thank you very much, until her cold, workaholic persistence hits smack up against the oligarchic wall. Indeed, Huppert ultimately ends up provoking the rotten system's regeneration -- Chabrol never gets really nasty, but this is so far the feel-bad film of the year. While other films come and go Chabrol's bitter drama currently has me puzzling over its conflicting thematic machinations.

The Pied Piper

The friends with whom I saw Jacques Demy's 1972 adaptation of the legend of the Pied Piper didn't dig it, and it seems like this unearthed quasi-counterculture artifact hasn't made a terrific impression upon its revival this past week (and through Thursday, see it before it's gone) at Anthology Film Archives. But I found a lot to admire in The Pied Piper, and it's my favorite of what I've seen from Demy, who I otherwise don't care much for (and that includes The Umbrellas of Cherbourg -- gasp! blasphemy!) Though it harbors a sputtering plot, the film expands outward from the bare facts of the legend and encompasses the intertwining relations between religion, economics, class, disease, and war as they existed (or might have -- Demy quotes Robert Browning as his source at film's end) during the Middle Ages. Demy displaces the fabled tragedy -- the Piper's musical seducing of the children out of the town of Hamelin and toward their doom is depicted as an ambiguous event, while plague-ridden Germany is rendered in grimy, dingy, dank detail. There's no respite from the disgusting conditions, not even in the songs of the Piper (a sympathetic Donovan), who offers to rid the town of Black Death-carrying rats and is stiffed by the greedy town authorities who are more interested in building a needless, gaudy church (which the Pope, occupied with expensive crusades, won't help build) than in aiding the people. This corruption is metaphorically visualized in a terrifically brazen shot -- during the ceremony to celebrate the strictly power-consolidating marriage between the burgermeister's pubescent daughter and the Baron's son (John Hurt), tons of rats bust out of a beautiful white church wedding cake. Don't let the film's original trip-promising tagline ("Come children of the universe, let Donovan take you away, far far away") or its predecessor, Demy's frivolous Donkey Skin, mislead you like the Piper -- this is an unrelentingly bleak film not meant for children (although there were several at the showing I attended). One of its final images is of the remains of the burning at the stake of a persecuted Jew. It's an allusion to the Holocaust bordering on the unnecessary, but nonetheless a shattering blow to those expecting Demy to soften tragedy with whimsy.

(The cast of JOSHUA, from left to right: Jacob Kogan (as the titular Joshua), Vera Farmiga, Sam Rockwell)

Spinelessly poised somewhere between suspense and irony, ineptness and derivation, low camp and high homophobia/misogyny, George Ratliff's THE BAD SEED-cum-ROSEMARY'S BABY-cum-THE OMEN-cum-THE GOOD SON-cum-A.I. Sundance offering JOSHUA isn't really worth a preview, save for its boasting an appearance by murmured Meryl Streep-in-waiting sensation Vera Farmiga. As much as I enjoyed her "make lemonade out of a lemon" wizardry with a weak-link character in THE DEPARTED, and though I'm as strangely, largely baselessly, optimistic about other future turns by this NY Times Magazine endorsed gelfling as the next fan of unorthodox-looking actors with real chops - it's necessary to prepare y'all for her rather embarrassing turn in this turd. Either left to her own over-emotive devices by a novice director or instructed to gamely ramp up the clichéd hysterics with each snoozily constructed scene of "suspense," Farmiga just looks, sounds, and moves all wrong. Granted, she's got nothing to work with here save for an ill-fitting Mia Farrow close-crop, stock postpartum insanity, and the task of working opposite one of the worst child acting performances in memory (not helped by the script's insistence that all of Joshua's lines either begin or end with, "Mommy" or "Daddy" - OMG, direct address is SOOO CREEPY!). But, pro that she is, what makes Farmiga truly pale is her actual investment in the shoddy material as co-star Sam Rockwell stands beside it, ever still Sam Rockwell. An homage in a film of wishful homages, this time to John Cassavetes' snarky ROSEMARY'S BABY turn, Rockwell's decision saves him - as it saved/condemned Cassavetes - from too close an association with the proceedings. Normally I far prefer the professional, vainless investment of a Farmiga to a mannered, half-serious Rockwell, but with this kind of material it's hard to begrudge an act of survival. May Vera, whoever she is, find her way forward, living down as she must this bloodied-foot, breast-pumped, crazy-mommy (or is she?) performance.

It begins with a gunshot, as from a starter's pistol, and the race is on. Gideon (Pierce Brosnan)—heavily bearded, feral from chase—is pursued across a frozen landscape by the steady, vengeance-driven Carver (Liam Neeson) and his posse. Motives stay opaque; Carver's gang churns through the snow in implacable advance, Gideon doubles back to pick off stragglers, and both men rankle with a hidden hurt that they cannot or will not forget. Shot under the auspices of Mel Gibson's Icon Productions (with Braveheart cinematographer John Toll), David Von Ancken's marathon-man Western trades in Mel's favorite things: out-of-breath action filmmaking in an allegorical vein.

Click here to read more of Nick Pinkerton's review of Seraphim Falls.

Who Is this guy, anyway?

Just as I’ve always found that it’s more profoundly satisfying to work a nine-to-five job under those you respect and fear than those you feel intellectually or spiritually superior to, I believe those film critics I find myself reading the most often are those by which I feel somehow humbled.

It’s always been my main motivation to try and tease out meanings in films, and try and wrestle with their attributes and shortcomings, rather than lord over them with dictatorial relish. When I don’t accomplish this task, when my ego or withering insecurity gets the better of me, when the need to look at the work from all sides crumbles in the face of simple spite or easy condescension, my own sense of failure is haunting. Yet just as I am inspired and motivated to keep on going by my colleagues and staff writers here at Reverse Shot, I am also appropriately spurred on by other voices out there, sparkling like diamonds in the very, very rough webscape of “ideas.” Judging from imdb.com’s eternally blow-your-brains-out boobish “comments” section, the old saying that “opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got ‘em and everyone thinks everyone else’s stinks” has never felt more prescient. All this is a prelude to introducing one rational, mellifluous voice beaming like a siren call in this age of passive-aggressive web crit …I’ve never met him, never spoken with him, and feel no need to write this as a way of fostering a web relationship or new reader base. But instead of merely posting a Link of the Day, I thought I’d give a serious shout-out to one of my favorite writers out there: Nick Davis, whose blindingly dense pieces (and just blinding...white on black text...eek, see also: this site) on the unpretentiously named ”Nick’s Flick Picks” are the sorts of rigorous, considered, passionate traditional reviews that seem less and less readily available. One gets the sense that every film is a not merely a discovery for him but a new way of pitting his own preconceptions and thoughts against each other and waiting to see which side will emerge victorious. So authentically immersed in the language of film, and furthermore, the politics of filmmaking and the attendant sacrifices and compromises that go hand in hand with the work’s ideological underpinnings, Davis’s writings (even when I disagree with the final summation, which is often) make for an exquisite call to action for all serious critic wannabes.

Take for example this throwaway line from his review of De Palma’s The Black Dahlia, which uses the minutest element of the film’s design to comment on its overall grammar: “…when a prop newspaper blares the pugilistic, nearly nonsensical headline GIRL TORTURE SLAYING VICTIM IDENTIFIED BY EXAMINER, FBI, you note its kinship with the grinding, arrhythmic, sensationalized syntax of De Palma's own movie, and you doubt that anything is a coincidence.” Or this perfect encapsulation of why The Devil Wears Prada is so fleetingly entertaining yet has a decidedly fishy aftertaste: “Best, then, to forsake our briefly rewarded hopes of a fully integrated film and to savor what's best, brightest, and most exciting about the movie we actually get. This is not, after all, a terrible way to regard a fashion spread itself: understanding clothes as riffy, imaginative aggregates of the old and the new, the inspired and the functional. Prada's own ensembles follow this basic maxim, yielding a film that is more satisfying to glance at and casually deconstruct than to contemplate at length.” More tellingly, when Davis praises a film I detest, it’s always for reasons that make me, if at least momentarily, question my own response. Hence, Palindromes: “A lot of the movie's most conspicuous identifying marks are less intriguing to me than what lies underneath the whole project, the million ways in which American culture obsesses itself with innocent infants and pathologized adults, so that the riven, confused, inchoate years of childhood and adolescence as they are actually lived are almost invisible to popular regard, and ripe for the kinds of surreal figures and the skewed but revealing exaggerations that Solondz offers here.” Do I still detest Solondz’s film for what I see as its caricatured, politically stunted approach? Yes, but Davis’s words make a silk purse from the film’s sow’s ear, and one is inextricable from the other in my mind now.

More intriguingly, Davis’s studied, intellectual approach to cinema resolutely does not remain outside of the mainstream routes and alleyways of film culture. Hence, his fruitful yearly correctives to the Academy Awards, which sandwich high art into middlebrow packages. Hence, by picking his favorite actors and pictures of the year and categorizing them by the Academy rules, he announces his own complicity in the game of award-mongering and predicting that eats up so much of the film year. Thankfully, he makes room for the unheralded and needy, even nominating Joao Pedro Rodriguez’s Two Drifters as Best Foreign Language Film, alongside Three Times and Syndromes and a Century. And this little nugget, from his explanation for his Best Supporting Actress nominee Ashley Johnson, from Fast Food Nation got me to nearly pump my arm vertically and exclaim Yes!: “How many actresses this young, and this new to cinema, can hold the screen so compellingly in shots of active listening, fond onlooking, genial small-talk, and the nearer and nearer tremors of a shifting inner life? Johnson is a terrific, fresh screen partner and a shrewd, disciplined actress, and she manages all of this with the ease of prime Kirsten Dunst, but without the aloofness or the heavy lids. She acts terrifically without ever seeming like she's auditioning for other roles, or straining to demonstrate her gravitas.... Johnson's is the smile with which Fast Food Nation serves up its terrible news. The movie wouldn't work if the smile weren't so sparkling, and so real, or if the gathering storm of fear and knowledge weren't palpable beneath that smile.”

Of course, Mr. Davis has an open invitation to write for RS at any point, though I don’t see how he could manage the time, or why this professor, located in Hartford, CT (stalker-like, I greedily culled it from his blog profile) would feel the need to hone his skills along with a pack of drunken, slovenly hooligans such as our staff writers. So I’ll just keep on reading….And, oh yeah, the link, again!

The success of the 2006 midterm elections may have tempered Democrats' long-held grudge against Ralph Nader, but An Unreasonable Man is set to reopen the nasty wounds left from his quixotic 2000 presidential campaign, when several hundred votes for the Green Party candidate arguably cost the Dems Florida and thus, lest we forget, the election. Whether Nader was right to run or just downright delusional and ultimately destructive to the liberal cause is the controversial heart of the matter in this content-over-form documentary. It's apt that the first 35 years of its subject's unrivaled career of progressive advocacy-- from "Unsafe at Any Speed" to becoming the consumer rights champion - are discussed for approximately an hour of screen time while the 2000 presidential race and the subsequent fallout matches that duration.

Read the rest of Michael Joshua Rowin's review of An Unreasonable Man.